The Golden Bird

by Maria Thompson Daviess

"I needed a husband so much more yesterday to help with the pruning of the rose-vines than I do to-day, Matthew," I answered with a laugh. Matthew's proposals of marriage are so regular and so alike that I have to avoid monotony in the wit of my answers.

"I'm never in time to do a single thing on this place, and I don't see how everything gets done for you without my help. Who helps you?"

"Everybody," I answered. I had never had the courage to break Adam to Matthew in the long weeks I had been seeing them both every day, and of course Pan had never come out of the woods when Matthew or any of the rest were there. "I'll tell you what you can do for me," I said, with a sudden inspiration about getting rid of him, for the red-headed Peckerwood had promised to come and put some kind of hoodoo earth around the peonies and irises and pinks in my garden, also to bud some kind of a new rose on one of the old blush ones, and I wanted the place quiet so he would venture out of his lair. "You can go on to town and look after Polly carefully. She is going in with Bess for the first time since their infatuation, and I want her eyes to open gradually on the world out over Paradise Ridge."

"Ann, ought they ever to open?" asked Matthew, suddenly, with the color coming up to the roots of his hair and burning in his ears like it still does in Bud Corn-tassel's when he comes over to see or help me or to bring me something from Aunt Mary, his mother. "Bess is one of the best of friends I've got in the world, but I just—just couldn't see Corn-tassel dancing in some man's arms in the mere hint of an evening gown that Bess occupied while fox-trotting with Evan Baldwin at the club the other night."

"Who was the belle of the ball, Matt?" I asked him, with a flame in my cheeks, for the pink and lavender chiffon gown Bess had worn was one of the Voudaine creations that I had brought from Paris and sold her after the crash.

"Oh, Bess always is when you are not there and, Ann, don't for a moment think that I—I—" Poor Matthew was stuttering while I rubbed the tip of my nose against his sleeve in the way of a caress, as I had a feed-bucket in one hand and a water-pan in the other.

"Do go and shop with Polly and Bess as a force for protection. I must have a quiet afternoon to commune with my garden," I commanded.

"Sometimes you make me so mad, Ann Craddock, that—that—" Matthew was stuttering when Uncle Cradd appeared at the back door to chat with him, and I made my escape through the barn and out into the woods. I had thought that I saw a glint of Peckerwood red pass through the pasture that way, and I was determined that Pan shouldn't give me and the garden the slip as he always did when he saw anybody around.

As I ran rapidly through the old pasture, which was overgrown with buckbushes and sassafras sprouts, which were turning into great pink and green fern clumps in the warm April sunshine, I gave the two or three Saint-Saëns Delilah notes which had been robbed of any of their wicked Delilah flavor for me by having heard Mr. G. Bird sing them so beautifully on the stage of the Metropolitan in that first dream night in Elmnest. But I called and then called in vain until at last I came out to the huge old rock that juts out from the edge of the rugged little knoll at the far end of the pasture. Here I paused and looked down on Elmnest in the afternoon sunshine with what seemed to be suddenly newly opened eyes. I had been in and out of Elmnest to such an extent for the last six weeks that I hadn't had a chance to get off and look at it from an outsider's standpoint, and now suddenly I was taking that view of it. The old rose and green brick house, covered in by its wide, gray shingle roof, the gables and windows of which were beginning to be wreathed in feathery and pink young vines, which were given darker notes here and there in their masses by the sturdy green of the honey-suckles, hovered down on a small plateau rear-guarded by the barn and sheds, flanked by the garden and the gnarled old orchard, and from its front door the long avenue of elms led far down to the group of Riverfield houses that huddled at the other end. All villages in the State of Harpeth have been so built around the old "great houses" of the colonial landowners, and between their generations has been developed a communistic life that I somehow feel is to bridge from the pioneer life of this country to the great new life of the greater commune that is coming to us. Down there in Riverfield I knew that there was sin and sorrow and birth and death, but there was no starvation, and for every tragedy there was a neighbor to reach out a helping hand, and for every joy there were hearty and friendly rejoicings.

"Oh, and I'm one of them—I belong," I said to myself as I noted each cottage into which I went and came at will, as friend and beloved neighbor. Even at that distance I could see a small figure, which I knew to be Luella Spain, running up the long avenue, and in its hand I detected something that, I was sure, was a covered plate or dish. "And I'm making Elmnest fulfil its destiny into the future—into the future that the great Evan Baldwin is preaching about in town, instead of practicing out in the fields. I wonder if he really knows a single thing about farming."